FOREWORD
Atthe northern end of the Shawangunk range lies a region where the Maker of Mountains went mad.
Into his new-laid rock the giant crashed his huge hammer, smashing asunder his handiwork, gouging out chasms, splitting it into fissure and cavern and abyss, slashing its eastern edge into a frowning precipice. When he had gone, up into some of his hammer-scars welled subterranean waters, forming crag-bound lakes hundreds of feet higher than the rugged valley floor. Other chasms became gulfs of verdure, crammed with a veritable jungle of hardwoods and evergreens. And there, in the labyrinth of tree and bowlder, fierce brutes and venomous snakes bred and fought and slew. It was the home of the wolf, the panther, and the bear; of the rattlesnake and the copperhead.
Then came men: savages who killed and ate the wild beasts and clothed themselves in their furry hides. Through the gorges and down the slopes they laid their trails, along which they roved for centuries in hunt and tribal war. At length they paused, staring eastward at new fires burning below them—the fires of white men.
The inevitable followed. First by firewater, then by firearms, the Dutch settlers crowded the tawny“duyvils” out of the forested lowlands between the river of Hendrick Hudson and the mountain wall. But behind that wall, in the natural stronghold created by the mad Mountain-Maker, the red men long held their own. More, at times they swooped out from the one small gap in the cliffs on bloody raids. And when the vengeful whites retaliated with invasions of their fastness, they ambushed those palefaces along their trails.
Then the settlers ended it. Trapped again and again within that gulf, they in turn became the trappers. Stealthily moving in force, they garrisoned the heights of Mohonk and Minnewaska; they outwitted, outmanœuvred, outambushed the Indians; they herded them back against their own precipices, cornered them among their own bowlders, slew them without mercy. Returning to their lowland farms, they left behind them a silent, blood-spattered, death-strewn hole in the hills which henceforth—because of its traps and countertraps—was to be known as The Traps.
Long afterward, men came in again; white men, and red men too, no longer foes. They cleared little farms, brought in their women, intermarried and interbred, led such primitive existences as might have been expected. Dwelling in their own little world, they followed their own inclinations in such matters as mating and hunting and drinking—and thereby achieved a reputation somewhat dubious. The tongue-wagging folk outside declared the Trapsmen were “wife-swappers” and “moonshiners” and other things. And perhaps they were.
Rumor has asserted, too, that these men first settled that craggy hole not because they would but because they must; that the country outside was “too hot” for them; that they even had to obtain their wives by becoming squaw men or by the primeval custom of capture; and that for many years their land was distinctly unsafe for any man not of their clan. This also may be true. Be that as it may, they lived hard lives, and many of them died hard deaths. Yet they lived as free men, untrammeled by slavish subservience to the myriad laws manufactured in the cities beyond them.
But they, too, passed. As the bear and the wolf and the Indian faded out of that country after the coming of the white man, so the Trapsmen have almost vanished before the encroachments of commercialism. Beside the upland lakes now rise those structures from which the pioneer turns with loathing—summer hotels. Moreover, virtually all of the intervening Traps has been bought in by the hotel barons. The little homes of the vanished men are slowly rotting apart; their tiny fields and their hard-grown orchards are going the way of the ancient Indian trails—disappearing into wilderness where snakes thrive unmolested. Few indeed are the people who now live in the mountain bowl; fewer still those who are native-born. The others are from outside.
Yet there are, in the region round about, two or three old men—taciturn, abrupt, whole-souled old fellows—who were born in the Traps and who will die not far from the Traps. From them, and from thewhispering ghosts which, by day and by dark, have drifted along beside me on the silent trails and talked to me in weird crevasse and uncanny old house, I have learned the tale which is here set down. It is a tale of Yesterday, in a land of Yesterday, chronicled by one who was there—yesterday.
A. O. F.
New York, 1923.